You know what? I’m starting to wonder if this Jason Arday fella isn’t quite on the up and up. Call me a cynic, or a racist. Perhaps I’ve finally succumbed to the pull of my ‘toxic whiteness’. But the evidence that the lauded critical race theorist and Cambridge professor is a fabulist, a plagiarist and an authoritarian is now hard to hand-wave away, despite his defenders’ valiant attempts to reduce the scandal engulfing The Not-So Talented Mr Arday to nothing more than a racially motivated witch-hunt.

The fortysomething Arday, Cambridge’s youngest black professor, stands accused of pilfering much of his PhD – the Telegraph found more than 100 passages that are identical or near-identical to those in another student’s thesis. Since then, questions have been raised about his apparently Herculean feats in the worlds of sport and charity fundraising – not to mention his claims he was threatened at work by a masked knife man and his parents had a pig’s head left on their doorstep. Maybe, just maybe, Britain’s most accomplished and menaced academic wasn’t all he made himself out to be.

Now we are learning of the consequences which greeted the academics and journalists who dared to raise questions about the DEI princeling’s work and backstory. And I’m not just talking about the public smears of racism, made in an open letter signed by such intellectual titans as Zack ‘Hypnotits’ Polanski. Jack Grove, a reporter for Times Higher Education (THE), was accused of harassing Arday (Grove had emailed him a list of questions about his thesis). A Metropolitan Police officer later called Grove to say no further action would be taken, while also warning him to stop emailing Arday, lest it further damage the prof’s ‘mental health’.

Grove wasn’t the only one. David Harris, professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, began contacting Cambridge and academic journals about Arday’s alleged academic malpractice back in 2023. For his trouble, he was also reported to the police for ‘harassing’ Arday. Thankfully, Devon and Cornwall Police declined to pursue it. Legal letters were also sent to Grove’s bosses at THE, in a successful attempt to kill the story, suggesting its ‘apparent attack’ on Arday’s good name ‘may be… racially motivated’. Remarkably, Cambridge is still standing by its man, against what it calls a ‘vile campaign to undermine his credibility’.

But of course. Who but a flaming bigot could take issue with a celebrity professor allegedly gaining his academic credentials on false pretences, or cock a raised eyebrow at his truly incredible list of achievements? Only a racist would question Arday’s (since-qualified) claims that he once ran 30 marathons in 35 days (some with a broken leg), raised £5million for charity (as part of a consortium, he has since ‘clarified’) and played football at a semi-professional level? Shockingly, even the Guardian has joined this modern-day lynchmob. Its report gingerly casts doubt on Arday’s stories of harassment and intimidation. The pig’s head that was supposedly left outside of his parents’ south London home? The Met ‘categorically deny’ ever investigating it. As for him being threatened at his place of work, not once but twice, the second time with a knife? The Guardian notes that ‘the intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious’. Nor did Arday ‘inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building’.

Should the holes in Arday’s story turn out to be as real and as gaping as they appear, questions would need to be asked about why it took so long for his cascade of bullshit to collide with reality. How did he manage to get a plum job at Cambridge, guest-edit the Today programme and enjoy endless gushing media coverage before anyone caught so much as a whiff of it? After all, plagiarists and fabulists crop up from time to time. That wouldn’t explain why some of the top academic and journalistic institutions in the land failed to realise Mr Arday was a cross between Ibram X Kendi and Jay from The Inbetweeners. At least in The Inbetweeners no one believed Jay’s tall tales about getting noshed off at the school play and knocking out a cow with one punch. Apart from the hapless, gangly Neil. Is that who Cambridge University is styling itself after now?

Perhaps Arday’s story was just too irresistible. On top of his supposed experiences of racism, there is his neurodivergent origin story – which, as of yet, hasn’t been called into question. Diagnosed with autism and global development delay aged three, Arday says he was unable to speak until he was 11 and couldn’t read or write until he was 18. Remarkably, he went to university two years later, before swiftly ascending the academic ranks. Here was the great hero-victim of the age, who furnished fashionable narratives about rampant racism and ableism, while allowing those who embraced him to pose as on the side of the angels.

But it’s deeper than that. The identitarian capture of elite institutions, supercharged by the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, has entailed the suspension of the values which once defined them – the displacement of truth, merit and excellence in pursuit of a mystical racial reckoning. When Arday was appointed by Cambridge in 2023, as professor of sociology of education, he was hailed more as a totem than a scholar. ‘His experiences highlight the barriers faced by many under-represented groups across higher education’, read a doe-eyed statement, noting Cambridge’s commitment to ‘creating academic spaces where everyone feels they belong’.

Thus, a warped notion of ‘inclusion’ conquers all before it, even at the expense of academic standards. Indeed, were Cambridge still the unimpeachable intellectual powerhouse it claims to be, Arday would be nowhere near it – plagiarism or no plagiarism. As Kathleen Stock has witheringly documented, his scholarship amounts to a lot of sub-Teen Vogue waffle about the racism of Britpop and the culturally appropriative crimes of Paul Simon. This is critical race theory, a bunk discipline, done badly. But it propelled Arday to the very top.

Jason Arday is right about one thing. Academia is riddled with an ugly ideology that treats minorities with contempt. Only it isn’t to be found in ‘structural racism’, or ‘ableism’, or a blinkered deference to the work of Noel Gallagher. It’s a paternalistic ideology that privileges identity over merit, that insists rigour is a barrier to black and brown success, that would rather indulge charlatans than reward the brightest of minds, of whatever race or background, for their brilliance and achievements. Not that I’m calling Arday a charlatan, if his lawyers – or the police – happen to be reading. I wouldn’t dare.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.